Monday, December 31, 2012

This weekend I saw the pristine 4K digital restoration of Lawrence of Arabia at the Castro Theatre. Including the 20 minute intermission two thirds of the way through, it was a 4 hour experience. The widescreen image was crystal clear, & the lack of film jitter made it even more stunning. It was especially worth seeing on the big screen for scenes when we watch small figures emerge out of the vast desert. Peter O'Toole is ridiculously pretty, & Omar Sharif is a prince of a man. Seeing Alec Guinness made-up as a swarthy Arab did not make me feel good, though. The depiction of the Arab parliament in Damascas reminded me of the racist Congress scene in Birth of a Nation. Maurice Jarre's symphonic score, played by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, often seemed like 80% of the movie's impact.

There was a line when I arrived about 15 minutes prior to the evening show. I saw 2 families attend with their children. The Castro Theatre organist got into the spirit by opening his set with the Triumphal March from Aida. He closed with the main theme from the soundtrack, which the audience applauded. Both halves of the program began with an overture of the film's music, played while the house lights gradually dimmed.

Over the weekend I saw We Are Legion, a documentary charting the evolution of Anonymous from a forum of pranksters on 4chan to an anarchic association of real-world activists. The film consists of archival video, commentary from observers of on-line culture, & interviews with members of Anonymous, all of whom look like they were the kids who got beat up in high school. The film links Anonymous to the Arab Spring, Occupy & Wikileaks, making the case that it is a potent political movement. One interviewee went to prison for a year for participating in an attack against Scientology's Web servers. We also see 20-year-old Mercedes Haefer, who was arrested by the FBI & faces a possible 15 year sentence for hacking. Ms. Haefer comes across as a passionate activist in the traditional sense. The film condenses a lot of hacker culture & history & suggests that DDoS attacks are the on-line equivalent of a sit-in. I left feeling that there is a lot more to say on this topic. I saw We Are Legion in the Roxie's funky annex, with an audience of about a dozen.

Friday, December 28, 2012

This special exhibit at the Walt Disney Family Museum commemorates the 75th anniversary of Snow White & the 7 Dwarfs. It's in a separate building, a short walk behind the museum's main building. The show includes posters, concept art, background paintings, animation ruffs, & cels. There are a few interactive kiosks & brief movie clips. All the artwork is beautifully executed, & much of it is exquisite.

I was surprised that so much archival material still exists, though it was not clear to me which pieces, if any, were actually photographed & appear in the final film. A museum staff member explained that while some of the cels in the exhibit are reproductions, cels mounted on a slanted, as opposed to vertical, surface are originals. Interestingly, Courvoisier Galleries in San Francisco began marketing cels from Snow White almost immediately after the film was released. Another staff member drew our attention to a poster featuring characters from the movie advertising a Swedish laundry detergent. He pointed out Happy, who delightedly handles one of Snow White's undergarments & winks at us.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

I'm in shock. This dry-looking letter confirms I can claim tickets for the 2013 Bayreuth Festival, for performances of Lonhengrin, Tannhäuser, Holländer & The Ring. The performance of Siegfried is on my birthday. I've entered the ticket lottery every year since the last time I went in 2003, but I never expected to hit the jackpot in 2013, the Wagner Bicentennial, of all years. It's impossible. I can't believe it.

Besides the confirmation letter, the envelope contained a seating chart & a postcard to send in to reserve accommodations. The next step is to pay for the tickets by bank transfer, but I'm not yet able to think straight.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

On Saturday I went to the nighttime edition of the Underground Market, an indie food mart taking place at SOMArts. Every since a New York Times article, the City has been threatening to shut it down, so this was the last event of its kind. There were about 20 vendors, all perky & lovingly proud of their food. Everything looked & tasted homemade.

I arrived a little before 8p, & the place quickly became a crush of low-key hipsters. It was sometimes difficult to figure out where the lines were. As one of my friends came away from a booth, a woman stopped him so she could photograph his 2 plates of food.

I couldn't leave without this sampler of fresh mochi. The dessert flavors, such as strawberry cheesecake, tasted just like their descriptions.

Admission required a hand stamp, as well as a warning that we might encounter food that was technically uncooked.

Another hand stamp was required for alcoholic beverages. It looked like a fish when applied but soon resembled an unsightly birthmark. This was not a cheap dinner, & drinks in particular were overpriced.

This cat, wearing a Christmas sweater & a leash, sat looking into the Peet's Coffee in Upper Fillmore on Saturday morning.

It's quite a beautiful cat. I snapped it's picture from inside Peet's, where I also discovered the owner, an old lady, who proudly explained how she trained the cat to stay on a leash by simple persistence. This is the 2nd leashed cat I've seen this year. Both cats acted weirdly immobile.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Over the weekend I got to hear baritone Jesse Blumberg in the intimate setting of a house concert, in an airy music room with a high timbered ceiling. The hour-long program consisted of 10 songs by composer Ricky Ian Gordon, who was present & accompanied on the piano. Mr. Gordon is a charmer. He introduced the pieces, shared stories, recited a poem by Marie Howe, & sang one selection. His music is pretty & sits somewhere between Broadway & classical. The songs often had a slow rocking motion. Some felt like lullabies. Mr. Blumberg's smooth, focused sound was easy to listen to. He gave us some lovely falsetto notes & presented the songs in a soothing manner. Even though I was at the back of the room, I felt like he was singing right to me.

The event was to promote the West Coast premiere of Green Sneakers at Fort Mason on February 13th. Mr. Gordon described it as an opera for baritone, string quartet & empty chair. He composed it specifically for Mr. Blumberg to perform. We heard the opera's quiet epilogue, which is also the only time when a piano that has been sitting on stage gets played. Mr. Gordon explained the work's personal roots in his grief at the loss of his partner from AIDS in 1996.

The performance had an audience of about 25 rapt music lovers. Drinks, light food, & Christmas desserts were available before and after. The atmosphere was very cordial, & I had a chance to chat with both performers. Mr. Gordon himself was one of the 1st people to greet me, & he told me we were in the house that Ansel Adams grew up in. § Green Sneakersby Ricky Ian GordonWest Coast PremiereJesse Blumberg, baritoneDel Sol QuartetSouthside Theater, Fort Mason, Bldg DTuesday, February 19, 7:00 p.m. (pre-concert talk); 7:30 p.m. (performance)

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

I had so much fun seeing The Hard Nut at Cal Performances over the weekend. This is the justly popular Mark Morris version of The Nutcracker ballet. The 1st act party scene takes place in the 1960s & is a slapstick comedy all by itself. It's not possible to follow all the on-stage shenanigans. John Heginbotham as Mrs. Stahlbaum is a convincing matron, & he brilliantly cheated the audienced out of a pirouette at the start of the act. Kraig Patterson is a great comic performer as the harried housekeeper & even dances on his toes. June Omura is entirely believable as the spoiled little brother. The show's fact sheet says she is 48! Mark Morris himself portrays the paunchy Mr. Stahlbaum. For the Waltz of the Snowflakes, the dancers create a dazzling snow storm by tossing handfuls of glittering confetti as they leap. The spectacle is worth the price of admission & had the audience cheering.

Act II tells a separate story about a round-the-world search for the hard nut that will undo a princess's unfortunate disfigurement. The national dances appear in weirdly satirical versions, such as an Arabian dance featuring a highly suspect figure in a burqa. The Waltz of the Flowers is another highlight. It's cheeky, unclassical & rude, yet also beautiful. At times it reminded me of a synchronized swimming routine.

The performance received an enthusiastic ovation & cheers. The dancers looked like they enjoyed the show as much as the audience. I did not see many children, though a father & his young son sat behind me & giggled frequently, especially at the unisex corps de ballet in the Waltz of the Snowflakes & the Waltz of the Flowers.

Monday, December 17, 2012

Talk about young audiences: Last night I received an announcement for a series of concerts aimed at "babies, toddlers, and children," presented by the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. The programs last 20 minutes & include musical games & short selections of classical music. They will take place in Berkeley & San Mateo in January, & admission is free. The press release mentions "tumbling mats as an alternative to chairs," which sounds like a great idea even for concerts for adults that are particularly long. I might have considered going to Einstein on the Beach if I had a mat to lie on.

I made the mistake of taking the 19-Polk to my afternoon destination this past Saturday & so got a front-row seat for SantaCon, the modern revival of the yuletide tradition of misrule that once got Christmas banned in this country. Young people in Santa outfits, or simply in red apparel, prowled the sidewalks & lined up at bars all along Polk Street from Union Street to Geary. I saw a team of Santas pulling a large wooden sleigh with female riders down the street. A posse of wassailers rode the bus with us for several blocks. They were buzzed but well-behaved.

I rode BART to the East Bay in the evening, & there were Santas in every car, in various degrees of booziness. The official San Francisco SantaCon Web page clearly states "This is not a bar crawl" then lists about 50 participating clubs & bars.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

As testament to the success of the DIY movement, I've been to 4 indie craft fairs within the past month without even trying. When I visited theRenegade Craft Fair late Saturday afternoon, it was bustling, & I was told that it was even more crowded earlier in the day. The Concourse Exhibition Center was jammed, & there was a feeling of abundance.

Up-cycling is the name of the game here, though there was something suspect about this drum cymbal turned into a hanging ornament by Chime Jewelry.

The cuteness quotient of both vendors & shoppers was near lethal. Grace Hawthorne of Paper Punk did a good job pulling me in by letting me fold one of the components from her paper toy kits. I bought a granola bar from the cheery folks at Awesome Bar but ended up giving it to a friend who skipped his dinner. He claimed it was indeed awesome.§ 4th Annual Renegade Craft Fair San Francisco Holiday MarketDecember 15 + 16, 201211am-6pm both daysConcourse Exhibition Center

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Friday night I heard Philharmonia Baroque's Christmas-themed, all-Bach program. Guest conductor Masaaki Suzuki has a great head of white hair. He gestures vigorously & cues all the entrances. He led with consistently fast tempos, though the speediness was somehow never pulse-quickening. The famous Air of the Orchestral Suite No. 3 felt arid. The trumpets often struggled to keep up with the rapid tempos.

The chorus of 23 for the Cantata BWV 63 & the Magnificat sounded happy & clear. Alto Fabiana González makes a clean, solid sound. Soprano Sherezade Panthaki has a pure, pretty voice that made me think of a bird in flight. Bass-baritone Dashon Burton has a deep, open sound, & there is a nice relaxed quality to his singing. Tenor Dann Coakwell's voice is clean & unstrained. He looked joyful & emotionally involved while performing. Soprano Claire Kelm moved back & forth between the chorus & the front of the stage to sing the soprano II part in the Magnificat. Oboist Marc SchachmanGonzalo Ruiz played clean & mellow obbligato solos in the cantata & Magnficat.

This concert presented the earlier E-flat version of the Magnificat, which seemed pretty similar to the standard version in D, except for a couple of interpolated choruses in German. Ms. Panthaki sounded mellifluous in the Quia Respexit. The voices of her & Mr. Burton, while both attractive, did not really blend in their duets. Organist Hanneke van Proosdij did double duty playing one of the recorder obbligatos in Esurientes implevit bonis, while harpsichordist Charles Sherman took over the organ. The male choristers did a nice job making their 16th notes in Fecit potentiam sound distinct & separated.

Yesterday I saw Steven Spielberg's reverential costume drama about Lincoln's machinations to pass the 13th Amendment through the 1865 Congress. Daniel Day-Lewis is physically convincing as Honest Abe, though I never got used to the high, reedy voice he gave the president. The movie's Lincoln is a tall, folksy Buddha. He's consistently calm, clear-minded & slightly detached.

It's a big production, with a cast of hundreds. They must have had an impressive budget for facial hair. Diffuse & smokey lighting gives the movie a luxuriously thick atmosphere. I was impressed by a meticulous shot in which the sun's rays just peek over the roof of a building in the background. The script by Tony Kushner is almost entirely debates & conversations in which everyone speaks in complete sentences. The movie is long, & I had plenty of time to ponder if it is actually a gloss on the Obama presidency, but I did not come to any conclusions.

Friday, December 14, 2012

I really enjoyed the cozy atmosphere of soprano Nadine Sierra's Salon at the Rex. She sang a varied program in Italian, German, Russian, French & English that ran a little over an hour. Her voice is polished & even & slightly dusky & her communication warm & direct. She did a nice job making everything smooth & connected, starting with the Handel aria Lascia ch'io pianga, to which she added a few soft, discrete high notes. She sang selections from Strauss's Lezte Blätter with a strong focus. The fearful atmosphere of Die Nacht was powerful & suspended. Rachmaninov's Six Romances had a similar fullness of emotion. She was intense & anguished in In My Garden at Night & flirtatious & conniving in The Rat Catcher. The unsettling ending of A-oo lingered. She was an outgoing Juliette in 2 excerpts from Gounod's Roméo et Juliette, which she said is her favorite operatic version of the story. She ended the program with a song mocking The 12 Days of Christmas, written by Fred Silver, who was her vocal teacher when she was 10 years old.

Accompanist Tamara Sanikidze is a secure pianist. She is also an exuberant talker, though she was still overcome with the emotion of the Strauss when she began introducing the Rachmaninov songs, which she described as the most "out there" music he ever wrote. She was glad that we had no translations of the Russian in our programs, which would just get in the way of our emotional imaginations. She also explained that "A-oo" is a Russian forest call as well as a kind of primal scream.

The audience was cordial & applauded especially enthusiastically for the Gounod. Someone requested an encore during the Q&A, but sadly the performers had not had time to prepare one. The Hotel Rex did not have the usual wine bar set up for this performance, & it took longer than it should have to purchase a pre-show drink in the lounge. Just before the performance Ms. Sanikidze chatted briefly with The Opera Tattler & me, then excused herself, explaining, "We have to go kick some ass!"

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Monday morning I heard an open rehearsal for this week's concerts by the New Century Chamber Orchestra. They worked on Vivaldi's 4 Seasons. Each movement features a different violinist of the orchestra as soloist, with music director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg in the 1st & last spots. Dawn Harmswas virtuosic in the 1st movement of Summer, & she joked around with her stance when Ms. Salerno-Sonnenberg admonished her not to face the cellos during her solo. Candace Guirao was capricious in the 1st movement of Autumn, playing with a lot of contrasts. Iris Stone played the slow movement of Winter deamily, & Ms. Salerno-Sonnenberg called out a "bravo" to Karen Sor's strongly grounded 3rd movement of Summer. Each musician simply stands up for her solo turn, so Jennifer Cho, playing the Adagio from Summer from the back of the stage, expressed concern that she could not hear the rest of the orchestra.

This was a working rehearsal, & the musicians engaged in discussion after each movement. They do not hesitate to make suggestions or request cues, & the atmosphere is supportive. Changes occur incrementally. It was interesting to see them decide on using a single viola for the slow movement of Winter through a process of negotiation rather than fiat, after Ms. Salerno-Sonnenberg warned the violas not to sound like chihuahuas. Liza Zurlinden had a very detailed list of notes for the ensemble for the last movement of Autumn, including the use of col legno.

The mid-morning audience was sparse but engaged, & they applauded each of the soloists. During the break complimentary coffee & donuts were served. This rehearsal covered all of the Vivaldi, but the complete program includes Handel's Entrance of the Queen of Sheba & contemporary works by Clarice Assad & Lera Auerbach.

Saturday, December 08, 2012

This festive holiday tree made of a old books, Christmas lights, & a coffee mug topper is on display in the Readers Bookstore at Fort Mason. The titles do not seem to be Christmas related. A nearby signs states that books from the tree will not be for sale until after the holidays. I was also glad to see that there is cafe in the bookshop again.

Thursday, December 06, 2012

This week I took advantage of the Jewish Contemporary Museum's free day to see The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, a show featuring street photography of New York in the 1930's & 40s. The selection is large & inclusive, & there were many names I did not recognize. All the images strike a balance between the aesthetic & the documentary, & every social issue depicted feels dismayingly relevant. A page from the 1947 New York Times is on display, & its headlines could be from today's paper.

Monday, December 03, 2012

Sunday afternoon I checked out Bazaar Bizarre, the big indie craft fair, at the Concourse Exhibition Center. A friend neatly sums up the artwork at these fairs as "owls, bikes & whales." The event was well-attended, & most of the merchandise, vendors & shoppers could fairly be described as "cute." Many of the attendees were families. I felt like I was in a nursery school.

Old maps were a popular item to upcycle. Here Granny Panty Designs folded origami flowers out of them.

A serious-looking fellow showed me a menu of squiggly, whimsical images that he could draw with a sewing machine. He used a bicycle to charge the battery that ran his machine.

I did not expect to see the many food items for sale, all with really nice packaging. Sweet Lauren Cakes, based in Bernal Heights, offered cakepops in packages that could have come off the shelves of an up-scale retail shop.